Voting…

Because I am still relatively new to voting I had no idea how math could be used other then to count how many people voted. The concept of a preference ballot really change the way i see voting.

I assumed that voting was just the person with the most votes wins. However this is only one type of voting. This is called a plurality vote. In the case below, the person “E” would be the winner because,that person received that most votes. You can see how this might make a large number of people upset considering he was voted last by everyone else.

With a preference ballot (“A preference ballot is a ballot in which the voter ranks the choices in order of preference.”) the person “B” should be the winner because more people voted highly of them. In each group, “B” wasn’t voted lower then second choice.

For it to be a majority vote, one of the candidates would have to have more then 50% of the votes. I this case it would have to be ≥ 226. I figured that out by adding up the total number of voters, 450, then divided that by two, 225, then added one to make it over 50%. If it were exactly half it would just be a tie and another vote would have to take place.

One Reply to “Voting…”

I understand the arguments as to why either B or E should win, but honestly one just makes significantly more sense to me than the other. Even though E had the most first-place votes, it’s clear that a most of the voting population has them as their least-favorite choice. The majority method is clearly the most fair way to determine a winner in any democratic election, but since that can’t be reached here, I think you have to take a look at who has the most support across the board, which is clearly B.